Why Do Wives Stray 1,000 Married Women Tell Their Story

Surveys suggest that somewhere between 30 percent and 65 percent of married women (and a higher percentage of men) will at some point engage in an affair.

Who are these women? Who has affairs? Women from small towns and big cities, young women, middle-aged women, women with children, women without children. Many letters I received began or ended with a variation on these words from a Minnesota woman: ``I`m short, gray-haired, overweight. If you saw me in the supermarket or at the PTA I`m the last person you`d ever suspect to be carrying on a passionate love affair.``

Educational background doesn`t seem to have much effect on whether a woman is likely to have an affair: High school dropouts and college graduates were equally apt to have had a lover or, in some cases, multiple liaisons.

Religious beliefs, however, do play a role. Deeply held religious convictions seemed to be the reason many of these wives who might otherwise have had an affair chose not to.

Fear of sexually transmitted diseases -- AIDS, in particular -- was also cited as an important reason for not having an affair. ``It would be one thing to risk my own health,`` said one Ohio woman. ``But how could I justify placing my husband in jeopardy as a result of my desire for a more exciting relationship?`` Approximately 10 percent of the women who wrote mentioned AIDS as a factor in their decision to forgo outside sex.

Nearly everyone -- regardless of religious convictions or lack thereof -- said they believe adultery is wrong. Virtually no one claimed to have gone looking for an affair. ``It just happened,`` they wrote.

SOMETHING MISSED

Some studies indicate that women who have had extensive premarital sexual experience are more likely to seek extramarital partners. But as Long Island, N.Y., sociologist John Gagnon, Ph.D., president of the International Academy of Sex Research, points out, ``Premarital experience can also leave a person feeling, `I`ve done that. Now I`m ready to settle down.```

On the other hand, Gagnon notes, lack of previous experience can leave a person wondering what she might have missed -- a notion confirmed by a large number of the letters I received. One-third of all the women who`d had affairs said they had married in their late teens or early 20s with little or no sexual experience before marriage.

The so-called sexual revolution and the media attention that has surrounded it have also contributed to curiosity on the part of many women. ``Every time I`d pick up a magazine or turn on the TV I`d hear about all this fantastic, mind-expanding sex people were having,`` wrote one woman, adding that both she and her husband were virgins when they married. A California wife, mother of two pre-schoolers, explained her affair this way: ``I felt I was the only person left who had had sex with only one person, in one position, in one room of the house.``

While a handful of women said they had had an affair during the first years of marriage, the majority of affairs began after the women had been married seven or more years, when they were in their 30s and 40s.

A surprising three-fourths of the women who said they`d had an affair had done so with a co-worker. Explains Bruce Friedin, Ph.D., a Long Island, N.Y., psychologist specializing in marital problems, ``Not only does the workplace offer married people the opportunity for getting to know someone away from their spouse, it is also the place where both men and women are likely to reveal their most attractive qualities.`` The letters I received confirm this. ``I always look good when I go to work,`` wrote one woman. ``I`m efficient, workers never hear me screaming at my kids or see me wearing rollers.``

THE OLD FLAME

After colleagues at work, old sweethearts were the most likely men with whom married women had affairs. More than a few told the story of an old flame rekindled at a high school or college reunion, which led to a love affair. For some, the old boyfriend might symbolize youth, first love, high hopes and dreams. For others the connection appeared to be personal and deep. One woman wrote that after 40 years in an unhappy and sexless marriage with a sick and uncommunicative husband, she had remet her first boyfriend, now a 60-ish widower. Five years later they still met secretly once or twice a week. ``I feel as if we`ve known each other all our lives,`` she wrote. ``And in some ways I guess we have.``

It may be an attraction to a particular man that gets a woman involved in an affair (``He is my soul mate,`` many women wrote of their lover. ``We were meant to be together``). Either way, it appears that an affair may have as much to do with what a woman is trying to escape as with what she is trying to find.

Many women involved in an affair spoke of loving their husband and wanting to remain married to him. So why would a woman jeopardize a marriage she valued and deceive a man she cared about?